Forget hacking hacks, let’s jail some callous Mid Staffs NHS staff

Why are police officers poring over the evidence from phone-hacking scandal,
while no one from the disgraced Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust has been
questioned?

In Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: 'I think it’s absolutely outrageous that potentially more than 1,000 people lost their lives because of poor care and not a single person has been brought to book.'Photo: GETTY

Six journalists were arrested yesterday as part of a fresh inquiry into phone hacking. As you may have noticed, the police are frightfully keen on tracking down rogue reporters. This brings the total number of people arrested in connection with the News International scandal to 106. Very soon, we may reach an unprecedented point where there are more journalists in jail than down the pub.

I hold no brief for tabloid hacks who break the law by intercepting phone calls. Prosecutions will take their course, and rightly so. But the journalists didn’t kill anybody. The powers of the press are great, but my fellow journalists are not the ones who failed to give the correct medication to desperately sick people or ignored the pleas of terrified parents who knew their small son was dying. It wasn’t a newspaper that buried worrying mortality rates and staff concerns so it could hit targets. And even the rankest hack isn’t generally in the habit of dragging a half-naked elderly man with dementia by the collar and telling him he’s “an animal”. These, I think we can agree, are crimes of a different order.

So why are more than a hundred police officers still poring over the evidence from the News of the World and The Sun (at a predicted cost of £40 million), while not a single member of staff from the disgraced Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust has been questioned, let alone arrested?

Robert Francis QC, author of last week’s scathing report into Mid Staffs, said there were “possibilities” for criminal charges to be brought for “individual manslaughter” or “offences in relation to wilful neglect of vulnerable people”. But Staffordshire police said it had “no active investigations” and was still “studying” the report. How long will that take, do you imagine? Can they even read?

In Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt urged the police to investigate. “I think it’s absolutely outrageous that potentially more than 1,000 people lost their lives because of poor care and not a single person has been brought to book,” he said.

By contrast, Mr Hunt’s colleagues across all political parties have been oddly tongue-tied about this disaster. Frankly, the story of Mid Staffs is an embarrassment because it punctured a big hole in our favourite myth. Like the Titanic, the NHS is meant to be glorious and unsinkable, not riddled with fatal flaws leading to huge loss of life. The official policy seems to be: keep quiet and hope the wreckage sinks.

I know how angry this makes you. After writing about Stafford last week, my inbox had more smoke coming out of it than a papal conclave. Hundreds of emails from readers, all saying the same thing. Enough! Doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants and NHS managers must be held accountable and prosecutions should be brought.

One reader confessed she felt moved to violence with a potato peeler on hearing the “self-satisfied, jargon-riddled twaddle” spouted by Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the English NHS, on Radio 4’s PM. “I had to play it again,” she wrote, “to make sure I didn’t mishear this smug bureaucrat first shedding crocodile tears for the patients who had died unnecessarily on his watch, but then explaining why the experience [of what had gone wrong at Stafford] meant he was just the right man for the top NHS job, from which he, of course, had no intention of resigning. Crass insensitivity doesn’t begin to cover it!”

I was struck by how many of you, when in hospital, had gone to the aid of other patients, offering water or simple comfort. Why are patients and their relatives having to fulfil the caring role of nurses? Well, here is Barbara, still a nurse after 30 years, who tells me she used to love her job “when the wards were run by Matrons and ward sisters and they were frightening and ever-present, and their skills were immense and I wish we could go back to those times. Now it is a terrible story.”

Barbara told me she wept when she left work the other night. “There were two nurses to 26 very dependent patients. I had a man who was dying and he was frightened and could hardly breathe; he wanted me to stay with him, but I couldn’t due to the demands from the other patients. So is this my fault? Am I a bad nurse? I could not have worked any harder; a 12-hour night without a break. How many other occupations is that expected of?”

Barbara has filled in countless incident forms and reported the dangers to her managers. “No one takes any notice, Allison. I will tell you what’s wrong with the NHS. We are over-run with pointless paperwork and risk assessment, all to stop us being sued. What is it for? I know if someone is at risk. I don’t need a piece of paper or a score to tell me. The best nurses are leaving in droves. We can’t do it any more. The people at the top have hardly seen a patient, let alone given care.”

So what can we do to make sure that people are held accountable for the shocking state of affairs that existed at Mid Staffs, and is still going on in many NHS hospitals? How can we help the Barbaras who are trying to maintain humanity in inhumane conditions?

Well, many readers are in favour of some kind of lay scrutiny system, like the one community health councils used from 1974 to 2003 in England. In addition to the official Ofsted-style system of inspections for hospitals proposed by Jeremy Hunt, concerned local people could spring surprise visits and ask patients how they’re being treated. Surely, hospital chaplains are in an excellent position to draw attention to unnecessary suffering: could they be persuaded to raise their voices?

Professor Richard K Rondel, an expert in clinical systems, suggested a national campaign where patient-relative action groups are set up which could check on the “almost certainly ineffective internal official monitoring systems” that will be set up in the wake of Francis.

In all this mess, I reckon a few things are clear. It’s clear that the health establishment can no longer be trusted to police itself. Quangos such as the Care Quality Commission should be disbanded and patients and relatives allowed to be the judges of their own experiences. Prosecutions at Mid-Staffordshire are necessary to act as a deterrent to other NHS managers and staff who are still failing to offer adequate care.

As Deb Hazeldine, whose 67-year-old mother Ellen died at Stafford hospital, says: “If nobody is held to account, what message are we giving out to society? That 1,200 people don’t matter?”

Last, but not least, Sir David Nicholson should stand down immediately as chief executive of the English National Health Service. The Prime Minister seems quietly determined to hang onto this acclaimed targets-enforcer. But Nicholson has to go, if only to prove that the system has registered the magnitude of the disaster.

The dead deserve nothing less, and the living demand more.

-------

What’s love got to do with Valentine’s Day?

If you go down to your local restaurant tonight, you’re in for a grim surprise. There will be no merry tables of eight, or even four. Just row upon row of silent twosomes, each with a single drooping rose between them. Him: chewing sullenly on his steak and trying to remember a line from a Kate Hudson romcom he once had to sit through. Her: slugging too much white wine and wondering why she thought spaghetti straps and bare legs were a good idea in February. Yes, it’s Valentine’s: the day when romance ends up with a filthy cold.

Some people blame Chaucer. He was certainly one of the culprits who put the whole Valentine’s nonsense into English heads, announcing that he had dreamed of birds who sat on soft boughs and sang: “Blessed be Seynt Valentyn, for on his day I chees yow to be myn, withouten repentyng, myn herte swete!” (I know that “chees” means “choose”, but it’s still a bit of a giveaway.) To make things worse, the fowl then pay tribute to each other by joining beaks. The direct result of this is that, over six hundred years later, Tesco is offering 12 roses for two quid. Nor are these blooms of a shade that we know from nature; no, they come in a red so aggressive that even a Ferrari owner might think twice. And that is the nub of Valentine’s, the reason it strikes such dread into genuinely tender souls: it’s compulsory love, the Stalinism of the heart – show me you adore me, right now, or else! It’s more like a bank hold-up than a declaration.

There may have been something to say for the Valentine’s palaver in the Age of the Shy. When stamps were something you bought and licked, the promise of getting an envelope through the post still had the spark of a thrill.

Infinitely worse, of course, was not getting anything through the post, and of having to fib to your friends when you got to school. Now, in the era of Facebook, who holds out till a freezing Thursday morning? And what’s with all the anonymity? If you fancy someone, you express it in the traditional, courtly way: share six Bacardi Breezers, throw up in a bush, then go home, text him a photograph of your breasts with his name (if you know it) written across them on lipstick, and tell the rest of the world about it on Twitter. So intimate. So true.

Normally, I have grave doubts about where social media are taking us. On the other hand, if they signal the death of St Valentine’s, then bring it on. It’s time to stop joining beaks.

-------

A little self-sacrifice, anyone?

As I’m already fasting on the 5:2 diet – smug, moi? – I won’t be giving anything up for Lent this year. Still, I thought it would be fun to suggest things other people could give up instead.

Victoria Beckham – give up not eating. It’ll be hard, darling, but all you need is willpower to force down a croissant. You’re in Paris now. They have them there.

Brad and Angelina – give up adoption (they are rumoured to be auditioning cute infants for their seventh child).

Ministry of Defence – give up wasting money on pen-pushers that rightfully belongs to soldiers on the frontline.

Katie “I’ve only had three” Price – give up husbands. Go on, it’s only for Lent!

BBC – give up Stephen Poliakoff. There are other dramatists, you know, and eight million quid spent on Dancing On the Edge is a lot just to remind us there was jazz in England before Ronnie Scott’s.

Benedict XVI – give up giving up. Popes, like marriages, should be till death us do part.